The Death of Respect and the Orphaning of Youth -By Stephen Sunday Laabes

Nigerian youth are not waging a revolution. They are fighting proxy wars for men who have already signed the peace treaty.

In the sixth season of Game of Thrones, the Battle of the Bastards is remembered as one of the most visceral, most brutal, and most honest depictions of what it means to fight and die for a cause. The soldiers on both sides of that field believed something. They marched into arrows and hooves and the crushing weight of men because they were convinced, in their bones, that the person they were dying for was worth dying for. The tragedy of that battle was not the blood. It was the sincerity.

I think about that battle when I watch what passes for political warfare on Nigerian social media. I think about it when I see a twenty-two-year-old in a comment section tearing apart a man who is old enough to be his grandfather, not because that man wronged him personally, not because justice demands the confrontation, but because the politician whose banner he carries has decided that the old man is this week’s enemy. I think about the soldiers on the field and I think about the young Nigerian behind the phone, and the difference that strikes me most is not the blood or the scale or the century. It is that the Game of Thrones soldiers at least believed they were fighting for something real.

Our young warriors are fighting for men who have already made their peace with the enemy. The politicians whose data boys trade insults across timelines and comment sections are, in most cases, in the same rooms, at the same tables, sharing the same handshakes as the people their foot soldiers are vilifying online. The drama on social media is not a reflection of a genuine ideological battle. It is managed noise, a choreography of conflict designed to keep the public occupied, emotionally invested, and usefully divided while the real negotiations, the ones about contracts and positions and the distribution of public resources, happen in the quiet of closed doors. The young man insulting a man who could be his father is not a soldier in a war. He is a prop in a performance whose script he has not read and whose director has no particular interest in his welfare.

But I want to go deeper than the politics, because the political exploitation of youth, as old and as consistent as Nigerian democracy itself, is only the surface of what is happening. Beneath the noise, something more fundamental is being lost, and it is being lost in ways that will not be recovered simply by getting better politicians or improving the economy or whatever structural fix we next convince ourselves will solve the problem. What is being lost is the intergenerational thread. The thing that connects an elder to a young person not through fear or hierarchy alone but through the mutual recognition that they are part of the same story, that the old person carries experience the young person has not yet earned and the young person carries energy the old person has already spent, and that both of these things are valuable and both deserve acknowledgement.

There is a specific kind of disrespect that has become normal on Nigerian social media that older generations have not fully named because naming it requires admitting how strange and how recent it is. A young person, in the comfort of anonymity or in the courage of visibility, addresses a man of sixty or seventy with the contempt of someone who has already decided that age grants no authority and that experience confers no wisdom. Sometimes this contempt is dressed in the language of accountability, as if insulting an elder is the same thing as holding power to account. It is not. Accountability is a specific practice with a specific target: the misuse of power. Contempt is a general posture with no target except whoever is in range. What we are seeing on Nigerian social media is primarily contempt, and contempt, unlike accountability, produces nothing except the mutual degradation of everyone it touches.

I grew up in northern Nigeria understanding, through the texture of daily life rather than through any formal instruction, that the relationship between the young and the old was not simply a power arrangement to be endured until you were old enough to escape it. It was a compact. The elder owed the young person guidance, investment in their future, the honest transmission of what had been learned. The young person owed the elder the respect that acknowledged their journey and the humility that recognised the limits of inexperience. This compact was not perfect and it was frequently violated by elders who used it to demand deference while offering nothing in return. But the compact itself, the idea that generations are in a relationship of mutual obligation, was a genuine social technology. It was the thread that made community possible across time.

That thread is fraying. And the politicians, north and south, Christian and Muslim, opposition and ruling party, are not concerned about its fraying because the fraying serves them. A young person who has been taught by social media political warfare that respect for elders is a colonial construct, that any man of fifty who holds a different view is an enemy to be publicly destroyed, is a young person who has been successfully severed from the social tissue that would otherwise make him harder to manipulate. The community elder whose authority was once a check on the politician’s local excesses loses that authority when the young people in his community have been trained to see his age as a liability rather than a resource. The politician gains. The community loses. The young person, the one doing the insulting, loses most of all, because he has traded a relationship that would have served him for a tool that will be discarded when it is no longer useful.

The cruelest irony of the battle of the bastards is this. When the fighting is over, when the comment war has run its course and the timeline has moved on to the next outrage, the politicians on both sides will meet. They will call each other distinguished. They will share platforms. The man whose honour was destroyed in three hundred comments will be invited to the next rally as a respected stakeholder. And the young man who spent his evening destroying that honour will not be invited anywhere. He will not be thanked. He will not be compensated. He will not be remembered. He will be available for the next battle, and the one after that, and the one after that, because the system that deployed him has no interest in his development, only in his availability.

This is not an argument for unconditional deference to elders. There are elders in Nigeria who deserve every criticism they receive and more, whose abuse of the compact of intergenerational obligation is precisely what has produced the conditions that make young people so angry. The critique of power, including power exercised by older people, is not only legitimate but necessary. But there is a difference between the young person who holds a specific elder accountable for a specific failure with the precision of someone who understands what accountability requires, and the data boy who trades insults with men old enough to be his father in service of a politician who will shake that same man’s hand at the next state function. One of these is political consciousness. The other is political servitude dressed in the language of rebellion.

A society that loses the thread between its generations loses the capacity to transmit what it has learned across time. It must begin again with every cohort, repeating the same mistakes, suffering the same losses, discovering the same truths that the previous generation already knew and could have shared if the relationship had been intact enough to permit the sharing. Nigeria cannot afford this loss. It is a country with enormous accumulated wisdom in its communities and its elders and its traditions, wisdom that the formal institutions have consistently failed to preserve. The young people who are being taught to discard that wisdom in service of men who already have their own, whose education and connections and resources insulate them from the consequences of the conflict they are financing, are being robbed twice. First of the future the economy has not provided. Then of the past that the politician’s data war is erasing.

The battle of the bastards ends the same way every time. The powerful survive it. The expendable do not. And when the battlefield is cleared, and the accounts are settled, and the alliances are remade in the rooms where the real decisions happen, the young men who fought most fiercely for lords who never saw them as anything but useful will find themselves exactly where they started, with nothing added except the memory of a war they did not need to fight and the loss of a relationship they did not know they needed until it was gone.